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Author Archives: Adam M. Smith

Adam M. Smith

Adam is a PhD student, research scientist, software engineer, musician, artist, and hacker. He has a very special kind of respect for those elegant weapons like lisp (pronounced "scheme") and prolog, for a more civilized age.

A Map Generation Speedrun with Answer Set Programming

By Adam M. Smith | Published: October 4, 2011

There’s nothing really special about this map-looking thing, other than that you can’t get from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner in less than 42 steps (I looks to take 56 or so). What is special here is how quickly we’re going to develop a flexible, style-ready generator for it. Set the clock for […]

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From Breakout to Space Invaders, All Over Again

By Adam M. Smith | Published: December 3, 2010

In the past, I’ve written about game design as a new domain for automated discovery, in which one might build discovery systems which uncovered new and interesting knowledge in game design. However, unless you are already familiar with discovery systems, all this might sound too blue-sky to even visualize. So what does it even mean […]

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Brian Lande at UCSC

By Adam M. Smith | Published: September 27, 2010

“‘When You Are Strange’: Mutual Intelligibility, Intercoporeality, and Accountability in Stranger Encounters” Brian Lande, Ph.D, Program Manager, DARPA, Arlington VA Date: Thursday, September 30, 2010 Time: 11:00 am Place: Engineering 2 Room 399 This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the […]

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Epic Game Design Tour

By Adam M. Smith | Published: March 8, 2010

This surprisingly broad lecture on game design was given by Noah Wardrip-Fruin to help students review for the final exam in our Foundations of Interactive Game Design class. However, if you are not one of the 300 students in the class, you might find it quite interesting to share with a friend. Perhaps you know […]

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cfml: the context-free music language

By Adam M. Smith | Published: November 12, 2009

For the ears: cfml-prototype.mp3 Context Free is an excellent tool for exploring generative spaces in the domain of 2D visual art (and Structure Synth does a fantastic job in 3D), but can a language of circles, rectangles, and triangles mutated by rotates, translates, and scales be translated into the domain of music? The result is […]

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Xorex: An Abstract Matching-Shooter

By Adam M. Smith | Published: August 24, 2009

Screenshot showing the player’s ship charged with pink ammo, carrying some yellow inventory. Xorex is a haphazard pastiche of various games I’ve played over the years.  It has several elements you’ll feel right at home with: gems to be arranged into color-matching linear groups, a forward-firing ship with flexible inventory and ammo storage, a grid-based […]

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